DIALECTJapanese Dialects

Japanese Dialects

The dialects of the Japanese language fall into two primary clades, Eastern (including Tokyo) and Western (including Kyoto), with the dialects of Kyushu and Hachijō Island often distinguished as additional branches, the latter perhaps the most divergent of all. The Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa Prefecture and the southern islands of Kagoshima Prefecture form a separate branch of the Japonic family, and are not Japanese dialects.

Japanese Dialects

Regional variants of Japanese have been confirmed since the Old Japanese era. Man'yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry includes poems written in dialects of the capital (Nara) and eastern Japan (see also Old Japanese#Dialects), but other dialects were not recorded. The recorded features of eastern dialects were rarely inherited by modern dialects except for a few language islands such as Hachijo Island. In the Early Middle Japanese era, there were only vague records such as "rural dialects are crude". However, since the Late Middle Japanese era, features of regional dialects had been recorded in some books, for example Arte da Lingoa de Iapam, and the recorded features were fairly similar to modern dialects. The variety of Japanese dialects developed markedly during the Edo period because many feudal lords restricted the movement of people to and from other fiefs. Some isoglosses agree with old borders of han especially in Tohoku and Kyushu. From theNara period to the Edo period, the dialect of Kinai (now central Kansai) had been the de facto standard Japanese, and the dialect of Edo (now Tokyo) took over in the late Edo period.

With modernization in the late 19th century, the government and the intellectuals promoted establishment and spread of the standard language. The regional languages and dialects were slighted and suppressed, and so locals had a sense of inferiority about their "bad" and "shameful" languages. The language of instruction was standard Japanese, and some teachers administered punishments for using non-standard languages particularly in Okinawa and Tohoku regions (See also Ryukyuan languages#Modern history). From the 1940s to the 1960s, the period of Shōwa nationalism and the post-war economic miracle, the push for the standardization of regional languages/dialects reached its peak.

Japanese Dialects

Now standard Japanese has spread throughout the nation and traditional regional languages/dialects are declining because of education, television, expansion of traffic, urban concentration and etc. However, regional languages/dialects are not completely replaced with standard Japanese. The spread of standard Japanese means the regional languages/dialects are now valued as "nostalgic", "heart-warming" and "precious local identity" and many speakers of regional dialects have gradually overcome their sense of inferiority regarding their natural way of speaking. The contact between regional languages/dialects and standard Japanese invents new regional speech among young people such as Okinawan Japanese.

Japanese Dialects There are several generally similar approaches to

classifying Japanese dialects. Misao Tōjō classified mainland Japanese dialects into three groups: Eastern, Western and Kyushu dialects. Mitsuo Okumura classified Kyushu dialects as a subclass of Western Japanese. These theories are mainly based on grammatical differences between east and west, but Haruhiko Kindaichi classified mainland Japanese into concentric circular three groups: inside (Kansai, Shikoku and etc.), middle (Western Kanto, Chubu, Chugoku and etc.) and outside (Eastern Kanto, Tohoku, Izumo, Kyushu, Hachijo and etc.) based on systems of accent, phoneme and conjugation

Japanese Dialects A primary distinction exists between Eastern and Western Japanese. This is a long-standing divide that

occurs in both language and culture.The map in the box at the top of this page divides the two along phonological lines. West of the dividing line, the more complex Kansai-type pitch accent is found; east of the line, the simpler Tokyo-type accent is found, though Tokyo-type accents also occur further west, on the other side of Kansai. However, this isogloss largely corresponds to several grammatical distinctions as well: West of the pitch-accent isogloss:

The perfective form of -u verbs such as harau 'to pay' is harōta (or minority haruta), rather than Eastern (and Standard) haratta The perfective form of -su verbs such as otosu 'to drop' is also otoita in Western Japanese (largely apart from

Kansai dialect) vs. otoshita in Eastern The imperative of -ru (ichidan) verbs such as miru 'to look' is miyo or mii rather than Eastern miro (or

minority mire, though Kyushu dialect also uses miro or mire) The adverbial form of -i adjectival verbs such as hiroi 'wide' is hirō (or minority hirū) as hirōnaru, rather

than Eastern hiroku ashirokunaru The negative form of verbs is -nu or -n rather than -nai, and uses a different verb stem; thus suru 'to do'

is senu or sen rather thanshinai (apart from Sado Island, which uses shinai)

Copula isoglosses. The blue–orangeda/ja divide corresponds to the pitch-accent divide apart from Gifu and Sado.(blue: da, red: ja, yellow: ya; orange and purple: iconically for red+yellow and red+blue; white: all three.)

The copula is da in Eastern and ja or ya in Western Japanese, though Sado as well as some dialects further west such as San'inuse da [see map at right]

The verb iru 'to exist' in Eastern and oru in Western, though Wakayama dialect uses aru and some Kansai Fukui subdialects use both

Japanese Dialects However, while these grammatical isoglosses are close to the pitch-accent

line given in the map, they do not follow it exactly. Apart from Sado Island, which has Eastern shinai and da, all of the Western features are found west of the pitch-accent line, though a few Eastern features may crop up again further west (da in San'in, miro in Kyushu). East of the line, however, there is a zone of intermediate dialects which have a mixture of Eastern and Western features. Echigo dialect has harōta, though not miyo, and about half of it has hirōnaru as well. In Gifu, all Western features are found apart from pitch accent and harōta; Aichi has miyo and sen, and in the west hirōnaru as well: These features are substantial enough that Toshio Tsuzuku classifies Gifu–Aichi dialect as Western Japanese. Western Shizuoka (Enshū dialect) has miyo as its single Western Japanese feature.

The Western Japanese Kansai dialect was the prestige dialect when Kyoto was the capital, and Western forms are found in literary language as well as in honorific expressions of modern Tokyo dialect (and therefore Standard Japanese), such as adverbial ohayō gozaimasu (not *ohayaku), the honorific existential verb oru, and the polite negative -masen (not *-mashinai)

Japanese Dialects Kyushu dialects have several distinctive features: as noted above, Eastern-style imperatives miro ~ mire rather than Western

Japanese miyo ka-adjectives rather than Western and Eastern i-adjectives, as

in samuka for samui 'cold' (also kuyaka for minikui 'ugly', nukka foratsui 'hot') the nominalization and question particle to, versus Western and Eastern no, as in tottō

to? for totte iru no? 'is this taken?' and iku to tai or ikuttai for iku no yo 'I'll go' the directional particle sai (Standard (h)e and ni) the emphatic sentence-final particles tai and bai (Standard yo) a concessive particle batten for dakedo 'but, however' /e/ is pronounced [je] and palatalizes s, z, t, d, as in mite [mitʃe] and sode [sodʒe],

though this is a conservative (Muromachi) pronunciation found with s, z (sensei [ʃenʃei]) in scattered areas throughout Japan.

as in Shikoku, but generally not elsewhere, the accusative particle (w)o resyllabifies a noun: honno or honnu for hon-o 'book',kakyū for kaki-o 'persimmon'.

/r/ is often dropped, for koi 'this' versus Western and Eastern Japanese kore Much of Kyushu either lacks pitch accent, or has its own, distinctive accent. 

Kagoshima dialect is so distinctive that some have classified it as a fourth branch of Japanese, alongside Eastern, Western, and the rest of Kyushu.